iMacmatician
Regular
Apple A11 SoC
- Thread starter iMacmatician
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Without any reference point, this will be hard, untill they have keep something identical .
The inner set of pads should correspond reasonably well with the die, seeing as those are the power and ground connections... Scale might be an issue, although is not maximum pad density relatively standardized/constricted within a set range, for manufacturability reasons?
Then there's the remarkable fuzziness of those pictures, which suggest fakery at work.
Then there's the remarkable fuzziness of those pictures, which suggest fakery at work.
There's also a picture of the board this supposed A11 slots into https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DH_zYjxXUAEuRz4.jpg; screw hole placement is claimed to be consistent with the iPhone 7 iPhone 7s Plus. So I guess some kind of estimate should be possible.
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iMacmatician
Regular
Thanks for the info.
From the above information and the 7 Plus teardown I made a very quick and rough estimate of the A11 die size: ≈ 86 mm^2.
UPDATE: There's a better picture here, and I got ≈ 83 mm^2 from that picture.
UPDATE 2: From this picture of a 7 Plus PCB and the die size of the A10, I got ≈ 88 mm^2. I think it's reasonable to assume a die size of 80 something mm^2.
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Or it could be the first chip with their new GPU design, which may not be as area efficient as ImgTechs per fps on GfxBench. I agree, if it is just a cut down version of the A10x (and the size estimate is correct of course), it seems somewhat large, but not by a lot necessarily.
iMacmatician
Regular
iMacmatician
Regular
According to Steve Troughton-Smith,
As pointed out in the Twitter replies, a mistral is a strong wind, so presumably this core is another evolution of the Cyclone line?Steve Troughton-Smith said:
Sorry I've got nothing 
But iMacmatian's estimate seems reasonable.
As for the name, mistral to me sounds more like an evolution of apple's 'little core' Zephyr, meaning 'a light wind'
Going from a Hurricane to a strong wind somehow doesn't sound right
As for the A11, I guess we'll find out the performance numbers tuesday, which may be the only interesting bit of the show, as it feels like everything else has already leaked
But iMacmatian's estimate seems reasonable.
As for the name, mistral to me sounds more like an evolution of apple's 'little core' Zephyr, meaning 'a light wind'
Going from a Hurricane to a strong wind somehow doesn't sound right
As for the A11, I guess we'll find out the performance numbers tuesday, which may be the only interesting bit of the show, as it feels like everything else has already leaked
So a 4+2 design where all 6 can run independently would be very interesting because it means they changed the Architecture for their cores. I used to think the A10X was built on the successor of hurricane, because I didn't expect apple to go through the trouble of shrinking an existing design, but after taking a closer look (and this would reinforce that) I now believe A10X is still hurricane, and the new stuff is yet to come. Apple is essentially running a half-year tick-tock cadence, which is extremely impressive.
PS: You gotta love that twitter handle
PS: You gotta love that twitter handle
Why don't mobile processors use SMT? I've been waiting for years, and it just isn't happening.
Any particular reason why, or is it more like, there's no genuine need for it?
SMT is about hiding memory latency by switching between threads. Current mobile workloads tend to not have many concurrent working threads.
Mobile games could be a different animal, but on the other hand mobile phones can't be running at full speed for too long, otherwise it will drain the battery in a very short time (and also could burn the user's hand
). So I think we'll probably see more cores before SMT in mobile space (of course, some crazy SoC vendors already have 8 cores SoC, but still).SMT is all about maximizing the performance of the silicon. In a phone environment you don't have the power to that anyway, so are better off with silicon that is mostly dark (10 cores, yay!!). SMT makes the most sense when you already have a very wide CPU core. With a wide core you have a greater chance of under-utilizing your execution units. SMT is a fairly cheap way to keep those idle execution units busy.
But as Pcchen says, multi threaded workloads are rare on phones; Or at least multi threaded workloads that require high single thread performance as well are rare. Nowadays I'd expect the Javascript engines in browsers and WebViews embedded in apps is where the biggest demand for high performance lies, - and those are strictly single threaded.
Cheers
Nebuchadnezzar
Legend
SMT and power efficiency are two opposing things and why we'll never see it in a proper mobile design.
Well, Apple's cores are already quite wide, 6-issue IIRC. Seeing as they tend to favor smaller SoCs over larger, I thought maybe it would be an easy solution to avoid having to drop in more cores...
Yeah, javascript... Is there a particular reason it doesn't scale across cores, or is it just that it was conceived at a time when there were only single-core computers and the overall design has been stuck since then?
If so, is there any efforts at overhauling javascript in an age where CPUs are getting increasingly multi-cored (up to what now, 28 in skylake-X?) And, as cores go up, individual core performance/single-thread tends to go down, thus counterproductive to what javascript in current incarnation needs...
Why would SMT be power inefficient? It makes the core draw more power, but that doesn't automatically mean increased inefficiency.
Nebuchadnezzar
Legend
The overhead is always greater than the performance gain, I don't think there's any case where SMT improves perf/W.
Javascript was designed and implemented in three weeks. Keeping the thread model to a single context was probably wise considering the average frontend developers' skill wrt. concurrency issues.,
Be careful what you wish for, you'll be loading webpages that max 8 CPU cores, because some developer don't know what they are doing.
Also, all massively multicored CPUs today turbo like crazy, exactly to accomodate the single thread scenario.